Top of the Lake and the Great Movie-to-TV Migration

We live in a great time for television. You didn't need me to tell you this. "Golden age of TV" has become a cliché, so much so that Wired was moved, in its new feature tackling the current state of the industry, "The Nielsen Family Is Dead," to change the phrase. We have been upgraded to the "platinum age of television." And it's starting to look a hell of a lot like movies a decade or two ago.

The latest to enter this era is Top of the Lake, a Sundance Channel six-part miniseries starring Elisabeth Moss, otherwise known as Peggy, which premiered last night to the most rapturous reviews for a debut show I can remember since Luck. The praise is for the most part deserved. Top of the Lake was created and co-directed by Jane Campion, still best known for The Piano, who uses her best instincts here. Moss plays a cop who returns to the rough New Zealand town she grew up in to investigate a girl who's been raped. She's tough, and not always likable. It's the kind of role Moss needed after Mad Men. Campion's treatment of the material is commendably savage, never letting it become anything close to weepy. It's a complex portrait of a woman who wants to break away from where she's from at the same time she can't help but be part of its evil streak. The grime that lies underneath New Zealand's unbelievable beauty is the real story.

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In other words, doesn't sound so different from a lot of cable TV, including The Killing and its predecessor, Twin Peaks. But Top of the Lake is being hailed as a new kind of phenomenon because of Campion's presence. Campion is a film director with a spotty history. After The Piano, she surfaced rarely, including for the botched In the Cut with Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo and for Bright Star, a 2009 period film with Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw. And Top of the Lake, despite its "next week on..." montages, is being treated a lot like a movie. The miniseries premiered to a lot of press at an all-day screening at this year's Sundance film festival. Though Campion worked with collaborators, she's clearly the main creative force behind the project, which sits relatively comfortably alongside everything else she's done.

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Campion isn't alone in her move to TV. As Emily Nussbaum points out in her review of Top of the Lake, plenty of well-known film directors have done time on cable series in the past couple years, including Michael Mann, Todd Haynes, Jonathan Demme, Mike White, and Nicole Holofcener (many of those working on Mike White's Enlightened). What do these directors have in common? Well, in the past ten years or so, they haven't made so many movies. An interview with Campion over at Indiewire gives some insight into why they've been happy to switch over to TV:

"What they said to us when we started this project was 'what we want is your voice... be as outrageous as you want to... don't hold back,'" Campion said. "I was like, 'what'?? It was a very different and provocative education."

"I think quite clearly independent cinema is struggling," she said. "It's difficult to get people out to the cinemas. And there's not a lot of art house cinemas around, at least compared to when I started making films. They used to be about where you went to find out about life and have different voices talking to you in an intimate and interesting way. I don't think that's really happening now. People are trying to second guess what an audience wants. Occasionally maybe two or three films a year will be truly innovative. But most of them try and second guess the audience."

Campion is hitting on the awkward transition phase movies find themselves in. While some independent movies by well-known directors are being made on the cheap and released on the Internet instantaneously, like John Dies at the End, the old model is still standard. Apart from patron-saint producers like Megan Ellison, whose company made Zero Dark Thirty and The Master, studios are wary of the same risks being taken by networks like Sundance Channel or AMC. The kind of adult fare Campion makes is now what thrives in the niche premium-cable business.

But it's hard not to wonder when all this will swing back the other way. Adults do go to the movies, though it's become harder and harder to see why. Last time Campion made a movie, Bright Star, it felt stuffed into an obvious theater peg: the polite, costumey historical romance. Here she's more on her own wild turf, and it's a lot more fun to watch. If Sundance Channel can make money off Top of the Lake, and HBO off Enlightened — and, well, it's still not entirely clear they can — then it stands to reason producers might want to rethink how they might be able to reap opportunity from filmmakers who have developed fiercely loyal followings for projects they no longer make. Top of the Lake is extremely well-made — gripping and visually dazzling — but beyond that, it's not so different from a lot of TV. A crime needs to be solved, and you keep clicking each week to see how. What's most remarkable is that TV like this almost doesn't make us miss going to the movies at all.